It took a while to get there—and another mug of hot chocolate—before Jenna had an idea about what was nagging at her so much. At least it felt like the right answer.
“I think the thing that bothered me the most is that I trusted Trevor,” she said. “It’s probably stupid, but I thought we had this connection. I told him everything about me—every secret I have—and I thought he would be completely open with me, too. I guess I was wrong, though. Now, I can’t get past this feeling that’s he’s somehow betrayed me. Like I said, it’s stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” Madeleine said. “Yousaid you kept getting the feeling he was hiding something from you. You think maybe this is that something?”
Jenna hadn’t even thought of that, but it certainly made sense. All she could do was shrug. “I guess so.”
There was a long stretch of silence as Jenna nursed her second mug of hot chocolate, replaying the moment she’d seen Trevor’s transformed face. It had been drastically different from the one she’d spent so much time kissing last night, but it had still been him. Her fingers itched with a sudden need to sculpt what she’d seen. The fangs, the shifted jaw line, everything.
“I’m not defending him,” Madeleine said, interrupting Jenna’s thoughts. “But I gotta think that it’s difficult for Trevor to trust people enough to tell them about the whole claw-and-fang thing. You kept secrets from me, too, remember? Like you, he probably had his reasons. Maybe, now that you’ve already seen him…different…he’ll be able to talk about it.”
“Maybe.” Jenna stood and walked over to the sink to rinse out her mug. She knew from experience how much of a pain it was to get hot chocolate out once it dried.
“What are you going to do?” Madeleine asked as Jenna put the mug on the counter, then dried her hands on a paper towel.
Jenna leaned back against the counter as she considered the question for a few moments. “First, I guess I’ll head downstairs to search my car and hopefully find my keys. Then I’ll come back up here and start working the clay. I need to clear my head, and sculpting what’s trapped in there is the only way I know to do that.”
“Then what?”
“Then I have no idea.”
CHAPTER 16
“I told you to stay away from her,” Connor mumbled softly, his words a bit slurred from the broken jaw that was still in the process of healing. “Now look what you’ve done. Jenna has run off to who knows where, and it’s all your fault.”
Trevor bit his tongue to keep from saying something that would start another brawl, concentrating instead on wrapping a bandage around his left forearm, the one he’d used to block most of Connor’s strikes. While he might not be keen on fighting with Connor again, his pack mate sure as hell sounded like he was.
From the corner of his eye, Trevor saw Hale and Mike perk up a little from where they stood on the far side of the huge room, along with Davina and the four members of HOPD. Mike had shoved him and Connor over to this table shortly after Jenna had left, telling them to stay there until they worked their issues out. Trevor felt like a kid on time-out.
He turned his attention back to Connor, bracing himself in case his friend was looking to throw hands again. But Connor looked too worn out and defeated. Maybe all the fight had drained out of him the second his sister had run out of the club.
Trevor could understand that. His insides were a churned-up mess, too. Sure, some of that had to do with fighting one of his best friends, but mostly it was the image of Jenna and the expression on her face before she’d left. He wanted to believe that Davina had been right about letting her have some space, but within minutes, he was already questioning his decision. What if she wasn’t okay with this? What if she ran and never came back? What if he never saw her again?
The thought had Trevor breathing hard and his fingertips tingling as his inner wolf fought to come out, needing to do something to fix this.
“I’m sure that seeing her brother losing his mind and trying to kill her soul mate had nothing to do with Jenna running away,” Trevor murmured, twisting his left arm this way and that, checking to see if there was any blood seeping through the gauze. “No, it’s definitely my fault, because I had the audacity to fall in love with my friend’s sister.”
“She’s not your soul mate,” Connor growled, though there wasn’t much—if any—fire left in his tone.
“Actually, she is,” Trevor replied, surprised at how calmly the statement had come out. He supposed a good bit of his own fire had gone out with Jenna’s departure, too. “I think I’ve known since I first met her that day in your apartment in Dallas and smelled her amazing honeysuckle scent. Theconnection has only gotten stronger since I came out here to LA. Now, the mere thought of not being with her makes me feel sick.”
He expected more resistance, but Connor simply went back to staring at the table, his eyes tracing along one of the large scratches across its surface. Trevor absently wondered how many of the tables scattered around the dance floor Davina would be able to save. Most of them had been damaged to some degree during the fight, and he couldn’t help but grimace at the thought of paying for all of them, even if he and Connor split the cost.
“Have you told her yet?” Connor asked suddenly, still not looking up from the table, his voice sounding practically subdued now. “About how you feel about her, I mean. I think it’s obvious to everyone you never got around to mentioning the whole werewolf-soul-mate thing.”
“I haven’t been able to find the right time to tell her,” Trevor admitted. “But that’s mostly because I’ve had to focus so much of my attention on dealing with her pain-in-the-ass brother. If you can believe it, all he wants to do is keep us apart. Without once ever asking his friend—or his sister—what they wanted.”
“I was only trying to protect her,” Connor said, but there wasn’t a whole lot of conviction in his words. “It’s what a brother is supposed to do.”
Trevor really wanted to push back against that and tell Connor he was full of crap. But at the lastsecond, he stopped himself, deciding to give his pack mate the benefit of the doubt. He was talking instead of throwing punches. That had to count for something.
“And what exactly were you protecting Jenna from?” Trevor wondered, asking the question that had been bothering him from the beginning. “Is this really about me not being good enough for your sister? I mean, did you honestly think I was going to hurt her?”
Connor didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he sat there, staring at the table again.
“I don’t think it was ever about you,” he finally said, the words coming out so softly that Trevor could barely hear them, even with his werewolf-enhanced hearing.
Connor fell silent again and Trevor had to resist the urge to push. He waited, tense and unsure of where this was going next.
